The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Finally: Encouraging News From Italy

Posted on | March 23, 2020 | Comments Off on Finally: Encouraging News From Italy

The curve finally appears to be flattening:

The death toll from an outbreak of coronavirus in Italy has risen by 651 to 5,476, officials said on Sunday, an increase of 13.5% but down on Saturday’s figure when some 793 people died.
The total number of cases in Italy rose to 59,138 from a previous 53,578, an increase of 10.4%, the Civil Protection Agency said — the lowest rise in percentage terms since the contagion came to light on Feb. 21.
Of those originally infected nationwide, 7,024 had fully recovered on Sunday compared to 6,072 the day before.

Italy has now been on a nationwide lockdown since March 9, so this diminution of the number of daily deaths was to be expected. The number of diagnosed cases continues to increase, but the people have been effectively quarantined for nearly two weeks, which necessarily is limiting the spread of the disease. The most vulnerable populations — the elderly and those with underlying health problems — have certainly been taking precautions, and so the pandemic appears to be losing its momentum. Let’s hope the trend continues.




 

Category: Italy

Nancy Pelosi Blocks $1.8 Trillion #Coronavirus Bill. Why? Abortion!

Posted on | March 22, 2020 | Comments Off on Nancy Pelosi Blocks $1.8 Trillion #Coronavirus Bill. Why? Abortion!

 

This is absolutely stunning: An emergency stimulus bill, intended to prevent mass bankruptcies caused by quarantine measures necessary to fight the Chinese virus, has been blocked by House Democrats, because it does not include a bailout for Planned Parenthood. Quite understandably, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is livid:

“The American people are watching this spectacle,” McConnell said. “I’m told the futures market is down 5%. I’m also told that that’s when trading stops. So the notion that we have time to play games here with the American economy and the American people is utterly absurd.”

Read the whole thing, or watch the video:




 

Category: Democrats, Mitch McConnell, Nancy Pelosi, Senate

#Coronavirus: The Italian Catastrophe and the Pandemic Danger to America

Posted on | March 22, 2020 | 1 Comment

 

Everybody complaining about the economic impact of shutdowns, quarantines and “shelter-in-place” orders to deal with the Chinese coronavirus pandemic should take a hard look at Italy. As I have pointed out, Italy was particularly vulnerable to this disease because they had a large number of Chinese workers — 300,000 nationwide — mostly employed in the fashion industry. (Also, Italy had more Chinese tourists than any other European country, about 5 million annually.) A lot Chinese workers in Italy traveled to China for the Lunar New Year celebration Jan. 24, and then evidently brought the virus back with them when they returned to Italy in late January/early February.

As pointed out by Tyler O’Neill at PJMedia and Stacey Matthews at Legal Insurrection, the initial response to the Wuhan virus outbreak in Italy was impeded by social justice concerns about anti-Chinese “racism.” The mayor of Florence, for example, took to social media in early February to promote the politically correct message “hug a Chinese”!

 

The fear of inciting anti-Chinese “racism” among the Italian populace had a harmful impact on that country’s initial reaction to the outbreak of a disease which indeed originated in China, but when Italy finally got serious about the pandemic, they got very serious.

On March 9, a nationwide lockdown order went into effect. At that time, there had been fewer than 500 coronavirus deaths in Italy. Now, less than two weeks later, the cumulative death toll is approaching 5,000, and Saturday there were nearly 800 coronavirus deaths in a single day reported in Italy. Some accounts suggest Italy is wrongly exaggerating their coronavirus death toll, but I think this suggestion is dubious. Even if Italy’s death toll includes cancer patients, AIDS patients or diabetes sufferers who might have died even if they hadn’t caught this virus, such considerations do not reduce the expenditure of resources devoted to treating these vulnerable people with underlying health issues. America has lots of vulnerable people, too, and if they get the Wuhan virus, nurses and doctors will have to treat them. That is the problem.

While I have never been someone who automatically trusts “experts,” the concerns of medical experts about the Wuhan virus pandemic deserve our careful consideration. What worries them is that there is a finite number of beds in intensive-care units, and a finite number of ventilators, which are needed to treat the severe respiratory problems that this disease causes. Reports from Italy indicate that, even apart from the coronavirus death tolls — which is scary enough — their medical facilities are being strained to the max in an effort to keep up with the number of patients requiring ICU treatment.

“Well,” says my patriotic American reader, “we’re better than Italy.”

True enough, but there are limits to what even American ingenuity can accomplish. Let us assume that President Trump waives all the regulations that might otherwise slow U.S. production of ventilators and other medical supplies necessary to deal with coronavirus patients. But what about doctors and nurses? We can’t educate thousands of new medical professionals in a matter of weeks, so the human resources necessary to treat tens of thousands of coronavirus patients is going to be strained — overtime shifts, 70-hour weeks, etc. — and every hour of a nurse’s time spent treating a coronavirus patient is an hour not spent treating patients with other medical problems.

Imagine being an expectant mother nearing your delivery date, when hospitals are trying to cope with this deadly viral pandemic!

Do you see now why the situation in Italy is so scary?

On the day Italy imposed a nationwide lockdown, they reported 97 new deaths. That seemed shocking at the time — a hundred a day! — but in the past 12 days, Italy’s daily death-toll has increased eight-fold. There are about 60 million people in Italy, whereas we have about 330 million here. If we cannot bring this pandemic under control — if we can’t “flatten the curve,” as they say — our number of coronavirus deaths could rapidly escalate to the point where many hundreds of Americans are dying every day. As I pointed out Saturday, 11 states have 87% of reported U.S. coronavirus deaths, so the other 39 states are comparatively safe. That’s good news, if you live in Iowa, Idaho, Alabama or one of the other states with zero deaths so far. If you don’t live in one of the pandemic “hot” zones — Seattle, San Francisco, New York City, New Orleans, etc. — the economic impact of lockdowns and quarantines may seem excessive, but the alternative is a loss of the safety you’ve had so far.

We can watch the progress of the pandemic in Italy and extrapolate the probable course the Wuhan virus outbreak here. The bad news is, it’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better. Italy went into lockdown about a week before similar measures were imposed in most U.S. cities, and yet the Italian outbreak continues to escalate. We can therefore project that the number of American cases will continue doubling every three days or so for the foreseeable future, and the death toll will keep mounting. Death by coronavirus generally takes two or three weeks from the time the patient first exhibits symptoms, so that patients who will die during the week of April 6-12, who were exposed to the virus a week ago, may just now be experiencing their first fever, cough, etc.

The good news is that, eventually, the Wuhan virus pandemic in Italy will peak, and the daily death toll will decline. My hunch — and it’s just a hunch — is that Italy will pass that peak sometime in the next 10-14 days. The cumulative number of coronavirus cases reported in Italy will still keep increasing (because it’s cumulative, after all), but the number of deaths reported each day will start going down, and once that happens, it will be possible to begin thinking about how soon it will be safe to end the quarantine orders, to re-open bars and restaurants, etc. Our situation in the U.S. will probably lag a week or two behind the progress in Italy, so by late April, the worst of the Chinese virus scare could be over.

Let’s hope so, anyway. In the meantime, we’ve got at least another month of “social distancing” ahead of us, and I must once again urge everyone to read this article about symptoms of the disease.




 

Category: Health Care, Italy

Madness: Teachers Accuse NYC Schools of Covering Up Chinese Coronavirus Threat

Posted on | March 22, 2020 | 1 Comment

 

New York City is now the U.S. epicenter of the Chinese coronavirus pandemic, with more than 8,000 cases and 60 deaths from the disease. The most shocking fact is how deeply the city’s school system is implicated in this outbreak. People need to go to prison for this:

One after another, sick Brooklyn Technical High School teachers called union chapter leader Nate Bonheimer last week, to tell him they’d tested positive for COVID-19.
By Friday, five of them had shared the devastating news. But after being notified about each one, the city Department of Education still ordered the 6,000-student school’s 350 staffers to show up for work last week, saying the building had been cleaned.
“The DOE did not close the school for any of the cases,” said Bonheimer, who worries that inaction exposed others to the dreaded infection.
The city failed to follow a March 9 directive by the state Education Department that “requires an initial 24-hour closure, in order to begin an investigation to determine the contacts that the individual may have had within the school environment.”
DOE did not attempt to identify close contacts, Bonheimer said. “They did not alert the people who needed to know the most to protect themselves, their families and everyone else they came into contact with.”
One infected teacher was so torn by the secrecy he took it upon himself to personally let all his students know his condition.
Around the city, teachers and administrators are outraged that Mayor Bill de Blasio and Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza resisted a drum beat to close the public schools in the name of safety. . . .
Some DOE employees believe de Blasio and Carranza deliberately kept the lid on the COVID-19 cases popping up, putting kids and families at risk.
“The blood is on their hands,” one said.
DOE staffers think the two city leaders tried to cover up the cases because they wanted to keep the 1.1-million-student system running despite increasing pressure to shut it down. Finally, with Gov. Andrew Cuomo about to do it, the mayor relented and closed the schools for students on March 16. . . .

Pause to think about this. On March 12, Maryland and Ohio — which have but a fraction of the number of cases in New York — ordered the closure of schools, yet New York City’s schools stayed open until March 16. Now brace yourself for something that will boil your blood:

The information freeze started March 10, when Carranza, in an email obtained by The Post, told administrators not to alert city health officials about COVID-19 cases among students or staff.
“At the moment, there is no reason for any school to call [the Health Department] to report potential or confirmed cases,” Carranza wrote, repeating the statement later in the same email. . . .
At several campuses and DOE offices citywide, multiple staffers have tested positive but affected buildings remained open while workers, students and parents were kept in the dark, whistleblowers said.
At the Grand Street campus in Williamsburg, which houses three high schools, a teacher returned from a trip to China over the February break. Despite reports of the outbreak, the teacher did not self-quarantine, but returned to teach kids in all three schools Feb. 26 through Feb. 29, a staffer said.
The teacher then became sick and stopped working. The school was not closed, and employees were not notified, insiders said.
Up to four other staffers have since become sick, they said.

This is sheer madness. Why would a teacher travel to China at a time when this dangerous virus outbreak was going on there? I mean, Trump shut off incoming flights from China on Feb. 3, and yet this Brooklyn teacher went to China nearly three weeks later, and taught for four days before falling ill? And then — to add insult to injury — the city’s department of education suppressed the information about this COVID-19 case? This is criminal negligence. Hell, it’s nearly manslaughter!

People in the Democrat-controlled fiefdom of New York City — the voters who elected this dishonest scumbag De Blasio, and who send vile subhuman monsters like Chuck Schumer to Congress — think they’re smarter than all the ordinary folks in “flyover country” who vote Republican. New Yorkers should be ashamed of themselves, but if they had any sense of shame, they wouldn’t vote for Democrats, would they?

(Hat-tip: Instapundit.)

By the way, as a public service, I ask that everybody carefully read this article about how symptoms of the disease manifest, and share it with everyone in your social networks. It could save many lives.




 

Category: Education, Health Care, New York

7 p.m. ET Tonight: The Other Podcast Surrenders to ‘Yellow Peril’ Hysteria

Posted on | March 21, 2020 | Comments Off on 7 p.m. ET Tonight: The Other Podcast Surrenders to ‘Yellow Peril’ Hysteria

 

For too long, my podcasting partner John Hoge and I have attempted to downplay the dangers of the Deadly Chinese Menace.

We tried to be voices of prudent skepticism amid the hysterical outpouring of Fear and Loathing unleashed by the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic. It seemed to us irresponsible — and perhaps even racist — to suggest that this viral plague from the Far East could infect millions of Americans, killing thousands, overwhelming our health-care system, wrecking our economy. And what was the reward for our caution?

“Oh, you’re just being right-wing apologists for the Trump administration,” they said, accusing us of partisan bias because we didn’t give into the climate of apocalyptic doom-saying. And after careful consideration, I’ve decided our critics were right. So tonight — for an entire hour beginning at 7 p.m. ET — we’re going to surrender to fear.

Yes, if Rachel Maddow is going to demand that networks stop broadcasting President Trump’s coronavirus press conferences because he is guilty of giving the American people too much hope — “fairy tales”! — she is implying that the responsible thing to do is to abandon all hope.

 

GODLESS COMMIE HORDES FROM RED CHINA!

Anything less than the worst-case scenario is wrong — that’s what responsible people like Rachel Maddow are saying, and therefore it is obviously time for everyone to give in to abject panic. We are all doomed, destined to die and be overrun by hordes of bat-eating Chinese!

You want fear-mongering? Why, I’m prepared to monger fear of such depths as not imagined since the days of Lothrop Stoddard. How foolish we were to imagine our pathetic “science” and so-called “democracy” could save us from these cunning Asiatics and their Oriental diseases!

 

Tonight — 7 p.m. ET on The Other Podcast — and if you want to help us usher in the New Era of Helpless Panic, call in at (646) 668-2541.

And, as usual, our greedy capitalist scheme requires us to remind you that The Five Most Important Words in the English Language are:

HIT THE FREAKING TIP JAR!



 

Category: China, Fear. Loathing., Talk Radio

Gay Men Spread Chinese Virus at Miami’s South Beach ‘Winter Party’ Festival

Posted on | March 21, 2020 | Comments Off on Gay Men Spread Chinese Virus at Miami’s South Beach ‘Winter Party’ Festival

 

At least nine men who attended the March 4-10 “Winter Party” LGBTQ festival in Miami have tested positive for Wuhan coronavirus. The annual gay festival in South Beach attracted thousands of visitors, among them a young physician from Boston:

Dr. Joshua Ellis, a medical education fellow and emergency medicine physician at Boston’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, was excited to celebrate his 30th birthday in Miami with five of his close friends.
They had been planning the trip to Florida since late fall — long before the novel coronavirus was even a blip on anyone’s radar. They rented a house on Ocean Drive, steps away from beautiful South Beach. They bought tickets to the Winter Party Festival, a week-long event that brings thousands of gay men to Miami’s hotels, nightclubs, bars, and beaches to raise money for LGBTQ groups in South Florida.
Ellis and his friends traveled to Miami in early March — before the cascade of shutdowns, curfews, and closures that would swiftly upend American life — from all over the country: Seattle, Denver, Boston, Washington, D.C.
Since then, all six of them have gotten sick and with the same symptoms: chills, sweats, fatigue, shortness of breath. Four of them, including Ellis, already have tested positive for COVID-19, the respiratory disease caused by the coronavirus.
“All six have shown the exact same symptoms at different times. So everyone in the household got it for sure — I am 100 percent confident; it’s too coincidental,” Ellis said in an interview this week, his nose running and voice hoarse. “The fear, though, is a lot of them were actively enjoying their social life [before they felt sick] . . . going to bars, going to dinners, going and hanging out at friends’ houses, quarantining with friends.”

Oh, trust the medical experts, they tell us. Meanwhile, Doctor Homo is partying down in South Beach with his gay buddies, who then return home to spread the deadly contagion across the country.

Speaking of homosexual activity in South Beach:

 

This is the sordid aftermath of the raucous drugs and booze party at a Florida hotel that left a male escort hospitalized and sent high-flying Democrat Andrew Gillum into rehab.
Plastic baggies of suspected crystal meth, empty beer bottles and prescription pills are seen scattered among trash and soiled bedding in the shocking images obtained exclusively by DailyMail.com.
Gillum, a married dad-of-three who narrowly missed out on becoming Florida’s first black governor, was too ‘inebriated’ to tell cops what went down when they arrived at Miami’s Mondrian Hotel early last Friday.
He was inside room 1107 with two more men, one of them a hunky 30-year-old male escort named Travis Dyson, who was found naked and in the throes of a drug overdose.
A police report says the third man, Aldo Mejias, 56, dialed 911 when fitness freak Dyson began vomiting and collapsed.
He later told officers from the Miami Beach Police Department that he had walked in to find Gillum and Dyson ‘under the influence of an unknown substance’ and Gillum, 40, vomiting in the bathroom.
Our exclusive images show the slew of drugs, both prescription and illegal, found inside the swank $220-per-night hotel room, including three bags of what police believe was crystal meth.
Dozens of white pills can be seen scattered on the floor and bedside table alongside empty containers of citalopram, an anti-anxiety medication, and gabapentin, which helps combat seizures and nerve pain.
There’s also a small bottle of an injectable medicine containing alprostadil which is typically used to treat erectile dysfunction and should never be mixed with alcohol.
Beer bottles and sheets covered in bodily fluids can also been in the photos, obtained from police under Freedom of Information law.
Cops declined to press charges and said Dyson, who posts X-rated photos and homemade porn movies on his profile page on the Rent.Men website, was likely to make a full recovery.
Gillum, a former Tallahassee mayor and regular CNN contributor, issued a statement within hours of the story leaking, apologizing for his drinking while insisting he never used meth.

Let’s be clear that this was a gay sex party. Methamphetamine and a drug “used to treat erectile dysfunction”? Sheets “covered in bodily fluids”? Do not expect us to pretend we don’t know what this was about. By the way, what is purported to be a nude photo of Gillum passed out on the floor of this South Beach hotel room has circulated online, and the Official Gay Community is angry at the “far-right” gay blogger who first posted it. Jacob Engels of the Central Florida Post says he obtained the photo from Republican congressional candidate Enrique Tarrio — a guy who we actually interviewed on The Other Podcast at CPAC 2019.

Anyway, I like how the “far-right” blogger reports the story:

At the time of the meth fueled sex orgy, Gillum was leading a powerful political committee in Florida, serving as a lead contributor to CNN, and was being considered as Joe Biden’s Vice Presidential pick for the Democrats. . . .
This is an ongoing story and we are currently working to obtain bodycam footage from law enforcement officers. Remember, this guy came within 34,000 votes of becoming Governor of Florida and was being discussed as a VP nominee for the Democrats.

If only Gillum had postponed his “meth-fueled sex orgy” a few more months, he might have become Joe Biden’s running mate. That’s scary.

So, in addition to the racism of calling this a “Chinese virus,” I suppose I’m now guilty of homophobia for calling attention to how Miami’s “Winter Party” helped spread the disease. Also, telling the truth about a Democrat’s “meth-fueled sex orgy” makes me a hater, I guess.

Political correctness requires us to pretend we don’t know things that we actually do know, e.g., what happens when thousands of gay men travel to a week-long festival in Miami. Even when the consequences of such behavior include spreading potentially fatal diseases, we are expected never to mention the sordid reality involved. You could lose your job — or get banned from Twitter — if you refuse to cooperate with the “progressive” agenda of this compulsory make-believe game.

Classifying the expression of certain opinions as “hate speech” involves an infringement of our First Amendment rights. You are not allowed to express disapproval of a “meth-fueled sex orgy,” or a gigantic week-long gathering of homosexuals (who may not be using meth, but are almost certainly having sex orgies) because there is a political agenda to protect such behavior from public criticism. Most Americans never stop to think about the motives behind political correctness: Why are some categories of behavior (and some categories of people) off-limits to criticism?

Once a special-interest group aligns itself with the Democratic Party, suddenly you’re forbidden to express a negative opinion of them. The rules of political correctness are always dictated by this partisan formula. Once upon a time, Catholics were a key constituency for the Democratic Party, which meant criticism of Catholic practices was prohibited. Once the abortion lobby and the LGBTQ crowd gained ascendancy among Democrats, however, denouncing Catholicism became more or less mandatory. Likewise, anti-Semitism was forbidden until the Democrats began soliciting support from Muslims, at which point Jew-haters like Ilhan Omar became the leaders of the party’s “progressive” wing.

Now? Democrats are eager to have the votes of Chinese bat-eaters, I guess. So while it is still legal to express an opinion on this subject, let me declare that I am against eating bats. (SPLC Headline: “Right-Wing Blogger Stirs Controversy With Dietary Hate Speech.”) So you can add that to the list of things of which I disapprove: Don’t eat bats, don’t do meth, avoid sex orgies in South Beach, and above all, don’t forget that The Five Most Important Words in the English Language are:

HIT THE FREAKING TIP JAR!



 

Category: Florida, Gays

#Coronavirus: The ‘Grisly Calculus’

Posted on | March 21, 2020 | Comments Off on #Coronavirus: The ‘Grisly Calculus’

First, news from the Associated Press:

Illinois and New York state joined California on Friday in ordering all residents to stay in their homes unless they have vital reasons to go out, restricting the movement of more than 70 million Americans in the most sweeping measures undertaken yet in the U.S. to contain the coronavirus.
The states’ governors acted in a bid to fend off the kind of onslaught that has caused the health system in southern Europe to buckle. The lockdowns encompass the three biggest cities in America — New York, Los Angeles and Chicago — as well as No. 8 San Diego and No. 14 San Francisco.

OK, the reason we have been getting scary warnings from public officials is because (a) they’ve seen what happened in Italy, and (b) there are limits to the number of urgent-care facilities available to treat severe cases of Wuhan coronavirus. In Italy, the death toll, which was 197 two weeks ago (March 6) is now 4,032, and they reported 627 deaths in the past 24 hours. As of 8:36 p.m. ET Friday, CNN was reporting that there had been 241 U.S. deaths from coronavirus, so if the pandemic here follows the trajectory in Italy, we could have more than 1,000 total deaths by Wednesday, and over 2,000 deaths by the end of the month.

Notice I’m counting deaths, rather than the reported number of infections. The reason for this is that death is a fixed target, whereas identifying people who are infected is variable. It has been reported that about 80% of people infected with Wuhan coronavirus have only mild symptoms — a few days of sniffling and sneezing, no different than the common cold — and some have no symptoms at all. There has been a shortage of tests for the virus, and many U.S. patients have only been tested in the past few days, so we can expect a significant upswing in the number of known cases over the next week or so, but that does not necessarily mean the actual number of cases is increasing. Therefore, I’m focusing strictly on the number of deaths from the virus.

According to CNN, these are the top 10 states:

1. Washington ……. 82 deaths
2. New York ……….. 39 deaths
3. California ……….. 23 deaths
4. Louisiana ……….. 14 deaths
5. Georgia ………….. 13 deaths
6. New Jersey …….. 11 deaths
7. Florida ……………. 9 deaths
8. Texas ………………. 5 deaths
9. Illinois ……………… 5 deaths
10. Colorado …………. 4 deaths
(tie) Connecticut …… 4 deaths

Of the total U.S. deaths (241), these 11 states account for 87%, and the top three states account for 60% of the total. In other words, 39 states so far have only 13% of the total U.S. deaths. While we can expect some shifts as the number of deaths nationwide increase, it is unlikely that the overall distribution will change significantly. That is to say, the 21 states that have so far reported zero deaths from Wuhan coronavirus (Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Delaware, Hawaii, Idaho, Iowa, Maine, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, North Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, West Virginia, Wisconsin and Wyoming) almost certainly will never be among the states most severely hit by this pandemic. A certain number of people in those states will get sick and die, but “social distancing” will limit the transmission of the virus, so that the worst impact of the disease will be in those communities where it is now most widespread. Most restaurants and bars are already closed, “shelter in place” orders have been imposed in several states and localities, and the areas now (relatively) free of the virus will probably be spared the worst of it. How soon will we know?

The key will be to keep track of (a) the total number of U.S. deaths, and (b) the percentage of deaths in the top 10 states in comparison to the rest of the country. As I say, the number of people reported as infected may increase rapidly without telling us very much. You could test positive for Wuhan coronavirus and never get very sick at all. It’s the serious cases requiring hospitalization that will put a strain on our health-care system, and the number of deaths will be a good barometer of how that’s going.

If you don’t have any symptoms, you don’t need to be tested. The media are panicking about the lack of testing because guess what? The media are based in urban centers where the risk of getting this disease is much higher than it is for Americans living out in the boondocks. An NBC News employee has died of Wuhan coronavirus, and two other NBC News staffers have tested positive for the virus. The panic over the disease is higher in “blue” states for a reason, as Ron Brownstein explains:

In several key respects, the outbreak’s early stages are unfolding very differently in Republican- and Democratic-leaning parts of the country. That disconnect is already shaping, even distorting, the nation’s response to this unprecedented challenge—and it could determine the pandemic’s ultimate political consequences as well.
A flurry of new national polls released this week reveals that while anxiety about the disease is rising on both sides of the partisan divide, Democrats consistently express much more concern about it than Republicans do, and they are much more likely to say they have changed their personal behavior as a result. A similar gap separates people who live in large metropolitan centers, which have become the foundation of the Democratic electoral coalition, from those who live in the small towns and rural areas that are the modern bedrock of the GOP. . . .
So far, the greatest clusters of the disease, and the most aggressive responses to it, have indeed been centered in a few large, Democratic-leaning metropolitan areas, including Seattle, New York, San Francisco, and Boston. At yesterday’s White House press briefing, Deborah Birx, the administration’s response coordinator, said half of the nation’s cases so far are located in just 10 counties. . . .
Democrats now dominate the places in the U.S. most integrated into the global economy, which may be more likely to receive international visitors or see their own residents travel abroad.
On the case-tracking website maintained by Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Systems Science and Engineering, each of the four states with the largest number of coronavirus cases is a Democratic-leaning place along the coast: New York, Washington, California, and New Jersey. Florida, a coastal, internationally oriented state that leans slightly toward the GOP, ranks fifth. Illinois, Louisiana, Massachusetts, and Texas, each with at least one big urban center that functions as a gateway for tourism and trade, come in next. And though the Johns Hopkins project isn’t publishing precise county and municipal data on the outbreak, the biggest clusters of disease have all erupted in a few large metropolitan areas.

So if, like me, you live in a rural area and don’t travel abroad, your risk of exposure to Wuhan coronavirus is smaller than people who live in Democrat-dominated urban areas — including New York and D.C. where the national press corps is based. The existing lockdowns, and the effectiveness of the “social distancing” regime, can be expected to limit the spread of the disease to areas currently unaffected by the pandemic. So while the number of deaths nationwide will continue to increase — and, based on what’s happened in Italy, we will probably see the rate of increase accelerate — most of those deaths will be in the urban centers. The elderly and people with underlying medical problems are at greater risk everywhere, but they are at less risk in rural areas than in cities.

Heather Mac Donald has pointed out that “there were 38,800 traffic fatalities in the United States in 2019 . . . an average of over one hundred traffic deaths every day.” Even in Italy, the country hit hardest by the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic, there have been fewer than 5,000 deaths. Comparing the coronavirus risk to other potential causes of death is a “grisly calculus,” Mac Donald admits, but it is the only way to put this into proper perspective and avoid panic.

In the meantime, don’t eat any bats and avoid people who do eat bats.



 

Category: Health Care

In The Mailbox: 03.20.20

Posted on | March 20, 2020 | 1 Comment

– compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
A View From The Beach: A Letter From Italy
357 Magnum: Some Discrimination Is (Apparently) Okay In The Age of COVID-19
EBL: Everybody Was Kung Flu Fighting!
Twitchy: Doctor Drops Slate Writer For Trying To Keep Panic Going After First Doomsday Wuhan Flu Predictions Prove False
Louder With Crowder: Trump Trolls The Media For “Sitting Too Close”, Suggests Most Should Leave
According To Hoyt: Seven Days In March, also, Look Beyond The Virus
Monster Hunter Nation: Hermit Lockdown Blog Update
Vox Popoli: The More Things Change, also, This Is Why You Don’t Bail Out The Banks

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Friday Hawt Chicks & Links – The CHINA Virus From CHINA Edition
American Conservative: Will Coronavirus-Weary Americans Start To Rebel In “Wartime”
American Greatness: Dangerous Curves, also, GOPe Parasites Bail Out Of Stock Market Before Chinese Virus Crash
American Thinker: Justin Trudeau’s Canada Is Obama’s Dream For America
Animal Magnetism: Rule Five Biden’s Hypocrisy Friday
Babalu Blog: Castro Regime’s Apparent Indifference To Coronavirus Has Cubans Worried
Baldilocks: Going Nowhere
BattleSwarm: LinkSwarm For March 20
Cafe Hayek: A Cut Above?
Camp Of The Saints: WuFlu Related – “The Right Of The People Peaceably To Assemble”
CDR Salamander: My Eyes Have Seen The Horror Of The Coming Of The COVID-19
Da Tech Guy: The Tom Brady Tampa Bucs Expectations Game
Don Surber: A Recession Won’t Save The Democrats
First Street Journal: Another Liberal Solution To Inner-City Murders
The Geller Report: More WuFlu Insider Profiteering, also, Three International Studies Find Chloroquine Shows 100% Success In Treating Coronavirus In Six Days
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post of The Day, also, I Haven’t Lost Any Money Yet
Hollywood In Toto: Dark Secrets Make Blow The Man Down Worth Discovering, also, Hollywood’s Tone-Deaf “Imagine” Unites Left & Right
JustOneMinute: Fashion Hints
Legal Insurrection: Sorry, MSM – 55% Of Americans Approve Of Trump’s Coronavirus Actions, also, Bloomberg’s Campaign Transfers $18 Million To DNC
Megan McArdle: When It Comes To The Coronavirus, We Elites Got It Wrong. So Did You Populists
The PanAm Post: The Red Chinese Regime Is Responsible For The Coronavirus And Must Answer For It
Power Line: Suicide’s Not Painless, also, Stop The Insane Overreaction
Shark Tank: Gov. DeSantis Signs Strict COVID-19 EO For Broward & Palm Beach
Shot In The Dark: Disconnected
The Political Hat: Firing Line Friday – The Economic Crisis
This Ain’t Hell: Dane Reason, Phony SEAL, also, A Friday Fish Dish
Victory Girls: Coronavirus Has Not Made Us Socialist
Volokh Conspiracy: Just Send The Checks
Weasel Zippers: OANN’s Chanel Rion Throws CNN Into Meltdown With Her Question For Trump, also, Dem Super PACs To Spend Millions On Ads Blaming Trump For Coronavirus
Mark Steyn: Skyping It In

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